It’s quite early in the new year as we prepare this spring issue, and resolutions still abound: the yoga studio is suddenly mat to mat, Facebook posts are rife with challenges and promises of change, and many of us are taking this time to consider who we are, who we hope to be, how we […]
Every fall, we have the true pleasure of featuring the winner of the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. This year, final judge Margot Livesey selected Shannon Sweetnam’s “Aisha and the Good for Nothing Cat.” This story, Livesey writes, “is set in a place of tragedy—Syria—but the story itself is not tragic. Despite losing various family […]
Unlikely associations and uneasy alliances flash—like summer’s sheet lightning—through the stories and essays in this issue, reflecting, incandescing, sparking: A young museum docent, stalled in her small-town midwestern life, befriends a man on death row (Rebecca McKanna’s “Interpreting American Gothic”). A man who struggles with human connections welcomes an enormous snapping turtle into his home […]
“Something had changed,” writes Marilyn Abildskov in her essay “Scotty’s: A Brief History of Expatriate Time,” a memoir of her time teaching English in Japan. “Something inside me had changed—some boundary had been crossed or become irrevocably blurred, and I couldn’t put the old order back in place.” We often can’t resist trying to pinpoint […]
Every fall, we have the true pleasure of publishing the winning story of the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. This year, it’s Katie M. Flynn’s “Island Rule,” in which an environmental biology professor is haunted by memories of the surreally accelerated evolution and ensuing political violence that expelled her, as a child, from her island […]
It’s something we almost all lament at some point in adulthood: how ephemeral summer seems compared to its endless stretch when we were young. Now, before May even ends, the calendar fills with summer plans and obligations until September arrives, the season fleeting, diminishing, disappearing in the rearview almost as quickly as it appeared on […]
How can a thing that is, essentially, nothing—a space where something else should be—have such pull?” asks Emily Sinclair in “Searching for the Duck Hole,” featured in this issue’s nonfiction. It’s a question that resonates throughout the stories and essays in these pages—characters and writers alike bump along and against the walls of estrangement, investigating […]
We prepare this issue for the printer just as summer slips through our grasp, giving way to fall, the season that requires us to let go, to give up, to give in. We put away the things of sultry afternoons and glorious, sun-stretched evenings, begin to prepare for the shorter days, the early frosts, the […]
Like New Year’s Eve, the onset of summer evokes plans and hopes, projects and promises. Often among them is the Summer Reading List. “This will be the summer,” we say, “when I read [insert major work you’re ashamed to admit you’ve never read].” But we might not necessarily start that list on June 1. We’ll […]
Amid the myriad ways we can create community, connection, and companionship—from the virtual landscape of social media to the analog experience of cross-country family visits—we often find ourselves profoundly lonely. Some of us desire relationships yet, heartbreakingly, can’t negotiate the push and pull of proximity and distance. In this issue’s fiction, characters experience the paradox […]